Sounds, well... awesome!
Perhaps this will be just what I need to get me out of my non-gaming funk.
Does one need to know the ending to Prime 2 in order to follow Prime 3?
You can probably get all you need to know from a small FAQ somewheres about giving a brief description of the previous two games. Then again, with perhaps the exception of Prime 1, I don't really think story has been the series strong-suit.
Anyways, I've got it, pretty much all I've been playing until recently. It took a long time for me to get adjusted to the controls, and for awhile I really hated the scheme- I mean, it seemed to make sense from a design perspective, but I couldn't quiet get it to work with me. A few hours later though I had it in the bag, I still find it hard to aim accurately at small moving objects, and sometimes I jerk off just an inch or two between aiming and firing which results in me missing. Natch.
I'm enjoying the gameplay so far, or at least up until I reached the last point I was at, which was a generic 'defend this location' objective that I didn't survive (and it didn't let you save once you receive the instructions to go defend said location, thus setting me back several hours when I accidentally hit 'do not continue'). I haven't really picked it up since. Nifty fact though; if you die by overhypering in corruption mode, you get a neat little alternate death.
Spoilerz and jazz below this, nothing too serious, nothing that isn't obvious within the first fifteen minutes of the game.
The story however, continually disappoints me. They seem to be heading more into Space Opera than 'solitude, archeology, action and sci-fi', which they also attempted with mixed results in Fusion. I wouldn't mind it if they had succeeded, but instead it kind of falls flat on it's face. You're introduced to the other bounty hunters and immediately realize that they're going to be bosses down the line. They don't even really apply much backstory to them, making their inevitable betrayal and your prompt slaughter of them nothing more than an empty gesture. I mean, maybe instead of all the journals about the ancient Bryyo culture that doesn't really come into play, we could get some journals or logs from the hunters you're hunting to make their corruption and deaths more tragic than just... tough boss fights? Or maybe we could get both? Adding text to a game isn't really all that hard.
As well, the Federation suffers from a bad case of generic starship troopers, mixed with fatal haloitus. The Aurora Units telling you what to do don't really add much to mix either, they're just generic omniscient voices pointing out the next mission objective, they lack personality.
I don't mind when Metroid attempts to go in this direction, I missed out on both NES and the SNES games until long after my childhood ending, leaving my judgment clear of over-nostalgia. That said, when they continually fail when they attempt this sort of thing... time to either stick to what you know or try something else.
